Works by year

Texts

Curtain to reproduce a quality of interior light characteristic of central Florida at sunset after a thunderstorm in summer (2011)

“I begin with curtains. Looking outward is an apt metaphor for life on the Prairies. Recent Winnipeg import Steven Leyden Cochrane has created a similitude of colour that reminds him of a sunset in his native Tampa. The electric green, crushed velvet fabric that comprises the 2011 installation, Curtain to reproduce a quality of interior light characteristic of central Florida at sunset after a thunderstorm in summer when hit by light (natural and fabricated) provides a sense of other, a simulacrum of various memories and events experiences in his formative years. It is, like so much contemporary art, a ghost; or perhaps a glowing sentinel. Beyond this shocking colour is something different dependent on the viewer: promise, disdain, and everything in between, from Manitoba to Florida and beyond. A curtain is meant to shield and shelter, to obscure and to conceal, but in Cochrane’s hands does the opposite. This is a personal system, recreated through collective memory.”

“There is Steven Leyden Cochrane’s collage using photo corners that would normally hold memories in place, but here are voided, rendered into a formalist geometric map of sorts that aches for what it can’t show[.]”

“It can’t start here. This is what comes after … after the beginning, or more accurately at the end, following the middle. This collage is a memorial for late night phone calls and missed opportunities. These photo corners likely once held promise, but are now a harbinger of things past, not to be, once was or maybe never were. Cochrane has made a road map of sorts, a symmetrically geographic exploration that might lead nowhere and everywhere at once — something not quite akin to a constellation, but that acts as a locator nonetheless. This is the Pac Man border town, only missing the cherries. This is a vortex in black and white. This is the hole, not the filling.”

J.J. Kegan McFadden, So Many Letdowns before We Get Up…
Catalogue essay

“This sense of loss is picked up in the quiet 2008 collage by Steven Leyden Cochrane. Although technically untitled, it includes a bracketed subtitle, (Nauseous from a broken heart) and is composed of black photo corners arranged to hold a grid of 4 x 6 snapshots on Crescent board. However, all the expected photos of a one-time happy couple are missing; perhaps they have been removed, or never even taken in the first place. The palpable void speaks to an attempt to erase history, which is coupled is a hope for new memories to replace the ones that are in the process of being forgotten.”